Former Google engineer James Damore claimed Tuesday that he was one of a handful of employees working on a now-decommissioned Chinese search engine before the company fired him.

Damore claimed on Reddit that he was one of about 100 people involved with Dragonfly, a search engine the company was creating to comply with China’s censorship laws. He was responding to a Reddit user who claimed to be a Google executive involved in firing Damore.

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“I was involved in the internal decisions involving James Damore’s memo, and it’s terrible what we did to him,” a user identifying themselves as TiredOfLying4Google claimed. The user went on to lay out the plan Google constructed to fire Damore without having to face too much backlash.

“We needed to make an example of Damore,” TiredOfLying4Google noted. “Looking for some excuse to fire him, we spied on his phone and computer. We didn’t find anything, although our spying probably made his devices unusably slow, preventing him from organizing support within the company.” The user created the Reddit account in December, according to their profile.

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“I was one of about 100 employees that knew about Dragonfly,” he said in the reply. “I also did report several legal issues in Search that they probably haven’t fixed. My phone and computer were also extremely slow after the document went viral.” Other Redditers pointed out that Damore talked about his phone problems during a 2017 episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience.”

Damore was fired in 2017 for internally publishing a memo outlining his views on gender differences and how they affect females in the tech industry. The memo,...